Prompted by Scott Kellog's comments on nuke dampers:
The nuke damper is a confusing chapter, at least as confusing as jumpspace,
reaction-less thrusters and extremely inefficient fusion reactors.
Different sources have different opinions about how it works, if it works and
how much it charges per hour.
Nuke Dampers in Old Traveller:
In 'Mercenary' it was mentioned that nuke dampers made it possible to prevent
nuclear decay. This was supposed to be used in 'americum drones', small RPV's
equipped auto-cannons that fired hollow americum (or some other superheavy
element). Upon impact the round collapsed and went critical with spectacular
results.
One might have some doubt over whether this will work even theoretically.
An analogus round (but much larger) made of plutonium or enriched uranium will
probably not work because the collapse of the round is too slow and to coarse
to produce a real nuclear explosion.
In any case, old traveller (and striker?) claim that the nuke damper damps
nuclear reactions by making the strong/weak force (I'm not a physisist, so I'm
not sure which one is responsible for nuclear reactions) fluctuate in nodes in
a field. It will have local maxima and minima in those nodes, and if the nodeis
placed at the location of a nuke missile that detonates, the nuclear reaction
will be supressed, and the fissionable materials will be just so much junk
metal.
Laser-ignited fusion warheads were mentioned as a countermeasure somewhere,
but I think that this was played down because of play balance in TCS.
The opposite nodes (when sufficiently strong) would make everything very
radiactive and even lead would dissappear in a burst of radiation (this is the
background of the disintegrator).
Nuke Dampers in MegaTraveller:
Some newer sources (MT Refs manual (Vehicle Design) and (?) Starship OpMan)
claim that the field of a nuclear damper will make fissionable materials
(permanently?) inert when they pass through it.
(This probably surprised many a General when everyone took the banned weapons
out of the closet at the start of the Rebelion. All those expensive americum
rounds just went 'plonk' instead of 'Ka[0.1kt]BOOOM!':)
There apparently is another explanation sneaking around where the nuke damper
cause the fissionable materials to decay prematurely, creating a small 'hot'
cloud of gaseous plutonium on a safe distande from the ship.
Nuke Dampers in Reality:
"What? Now he's really off the deep end!" you say. That isn't (entirely)
accurate, though. There were an short article in an old New Scientist
(Brittish paper, Scientific American class but has many shorter articles on
scientific news. It also runs 'Grimbledon Down' a comic strip about life at
a military research installation:) about a curious result of quatum mecanics.
I assume that you all know Scroedingers cat. ("Shroedingers cat, the TML.
TML, Shroedingers Cat.") ie that radiactive decay is a probability function that
will break down into one of two possible result (have decayed or havn't decayed)
when it is observed, not before. Either result will be 50% probable if we have
left it alone for the time of one half-life.
If one keeps observing the atom continousy, it will be locked in the original
state, because the probability function will be be continously 'broken down'.
The article was about how a research team had proven this in an experiment.
They had used very fast laser pulses to illuminate the atoms of an radiactive
substanse, thus forcing them into a predictable state.
When the time between the pulses became small enough (and that was the real
challenge) the substance's half-life became longer...
It seems that nuke dampers is at least physically possible.
- - -bertil-
- - --
Nuclear Damper: device used by the referee to dampen the worst player excesses.